CRICE: Cyber Range Infrastructure for Cybersecurity Education

Professionals in the cybersecurity field are in high demand in industry and government. Community colleges have a significant student population that has the potential to enable a new stream of cybersecurity professionals and meet the demand. However, community colleges often lack sufficient computing infrastructure to actively support hands-on learning of cybersecurity concepts, tools, and techniques. To assist community colleges without an extensive computing infrastructure, this paper proposes CRICE, a Cyber Range Infrastructure for Cybersecurity Education using NSFCloud, an open-access and free cloud service, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and designed for academic education, research, and training purposes. CRICE aims to bring community college students into the high-rewarding cybersecurity field to secure and support the United States’ cyber infrastructure.